For the first time, in the context of the LICHTER Filmfestival, LICHTER Streetview will take place on March 22nd and 23rd. The idea behind it is to animate the Roßmarkt in the center of Frankfurt with plenty of different projections. There will be projections onto buildings, do-it-yourself cinema, video performances, installations and workshops with international artists. LICHTER Streetview is the attempt to establish a permanent festival, true to the maxim, »out of the cinema and into the city.« The following artists will take part:

on/off: Kopfkino »The divisions between the producer and consumers, makers and users of designed products and processes appear to be vanishing« (Tom Holert). The transnational, Berlin based, network »on/off« invites artists from around the world to deal with the urban space. Their works and projects show the undeveloped potential of the city and question its reinterpretation and (re-)appropriation. The performative installation »Kopfkino«, which already caused a stir at the Istanbul Biennale, uses the simplest of materials and resources such as a car battery, a beamer and a shopping cart. The result is a mobile projection unit that allows the images of residents and passersby to be projected onto the streets and houses of the city. Thus, the moving image itself becomes mobile and mediates between the scale of the city and of its people.

Tagtool With a live instrument for projection art, the Viennese art collective Tagtool traces a very special universe of moving images. Using the Tagtool, a scene is designed, changed over time and expanded to turn the night on a facade into a canvas. Added to this is an iPad that complements the performance in the public space. The pedestrians have the opportunity to switch between animation and painting. Through the open session, together with the player of the Tagtoolers, individual artistic visual moments are created.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik: Surveillance Chess In their work »Surveillance Chess«, !Mediengruppe Bitnik deals with the surveillance of public space. To this end they use a jammer in order to hack into surveillance systems and to manipulate their image production. Instead of the transmitted real-time surveillance images the security personnel will be presented with a friendly invitation: How about a game of chess? “Surveillance Chess“ transforms the monitor in the control room into a video game console and invites the – otherwise invisible and apathetic – guards of the urban playing fields to join the game themselves. Thus, the hierarchies of surveillance are reorganized and reinterpreted as a »friendly takeover«.

Nika Radic: 3 Windows The native of Zagreb and Berlin-based artist Nika Radic, approaches her work not without irony. She explores the blurring boundaries between public and private, between intimacy and voyeurism. Several years ago, the 3-channel installation »3 Windows« captured the urban space in Berlin and provided onlookers with the ambivalent pleasure of observing strangers behind their curtains. A situation which could be seen as a reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, »Rear Window«. Radic’s video works leave the safe context of galleries and exhibition spaces, to conquer the facades of the town and on them, to tell the stories of their protagonists.

Random City Intervention Under the title, »Random Revolution« LICHTER 2012 presented for the first time a reel of short films, which was developed jointly with members of the OCCUPY:FRANKFURT video team. With »Random City Intervention« we are continuing this program, this time together with the curators of FIESER hacktivism and LIBERATION MOVIES. »Random City Intervention« snatches short films from their context and takes them to cinematic non-places: to public spaces. Online turns into offline, film into a clip, the short film into a public backdrop. Thereby, this intervention questions to whom the cities belong, what animates them – and what suffocates them.

Benjamin Gaulon: 2.4 Ghz Benjamin Gaulon, also known under the name of Recyclism, is an artist, researcher and lecturer in art and design at the National College in Dublin. For the project »2.4 Ghz«, Gaulon taps with surprisingly little technical input into wireless security cameras and makes these recordings, using small monitors, publicly visible. In various European cities, he collects pictures of places and sites where camera signals can be received. Afterwards these images are shown on monitors, which in turn are placed in public spaces. Gaulon’s work reveals the omnipresence of surveillance systems and systems of control. Essential part of the project is the »2.4 Ghz workshop« in which participants actively seek out signals in their city and record the surveillance footage. Later, these recordings are edited into a film.

NODE: An Strahlen During NODE13 Florian Egermann (MESO) and Thomas Eichhorn (NODE) premiered the project »An Strahlen«, which shall now be continued in the context of LICHTER Streetview. In it, neither facades nor screens serve as projection surfaces but the pedestrians themselves will take on this function. A video loop can only be perceived as a beam at first but can be transformed into a moving image as soon as the audience follows the invitation and turns itself into the screen.

Mitternachtskino »We had the idea of staging Mitternachtskino in Frankfurt in 2011, because we are missing a place here where experimental films can be seen and shown, and we also do not know of a meeting point where film buffs can meet and exchange themselves.« Sophie Hunger is the initiator of the Mitternachtskino. Since cinema means more to her than watching movies solitarily, and because she wants to enable each and everyone who is interested to access it, the midnight movie takes place in an easy to reach public place and is free of charge. For this, she does not require more than one screen and a projector.

LivingdomeLivingdome is a mobile, organic dome. The form is based on the geometry of the icosahedron, a body of 20 equilateral triangles and is one of the five platonic solids by W. Bauersfeld and B. Fuller. The construction consists entirely of renewable materials: wood, leather and hemp. The wooden poles are assembled into various shapes with leather connections, thus forming a stable dome-shaped building. By covering the scaffolding with a tarp, a versatile, safe space is created inside. Once set up, the Livingdome offers space for events and experiences of different nature. Both, the erection and the dismantling can be seen and experienced as a participatory event, as all the participants come to relate to each other not only communicatively but also materially and visibly. The mobile structure of the dome is variable – literally transparent – and with this transparency, it does not manipulate, but provides impulses for individual concerns.

Simon Schäfer: Gazillion GazeboSimon Shepherd, aka »der Warst«, is a sculptor, musician, video artist and circuit bender. For LICHTER Streetview, the Londoner-of-choice returns to Germany to present his work Gazillion Gazebo. An audio-visual live performance that is inspired by the over-stimulation of the urban living environment. An ordinary garden pavilion, filled with various projections and a jumbled laboratory of modified video and music equipment, is transformed into an immersive spatial experience as well as a pulsating public sculpture.

Pascal Davíd Breitenbach & Timotheus Kartmann: Art and Revolution »Art and Revolution -The International Situationists between the poles of separate sequences, audio tracks and characters,« is the concept of the undefined group from Frankfurt, which emerges through spontaneous ideas. The artists move in a context of open-air raves, city intervention, soup kitchen and party praxis theory. In this context, together with musicians. they have created an open-air silent movie cinema for the streets. For LICHTER Streetview, they show four films that are accompanied by a live musician. The projections start either simultaneously or are staggered, but range within a spectrum. French philosophers, situationists, Gilles Deleuze or Algerian documentaries – all films are shown in their original language and blend into a multi-layered sound clash, excluding absolute understanding…

LICHTER Streetview 3/22 to 3/23/2013 from 8 p.m. to midnight at Roßmarkt – a public space in the center of Frankfurt/Germany

There is abundant evidence for the thesis that the city invented cinema and cinema invented the city. The love story of film and the city goes back to the earliest days of the moving image. Movies are fascinated by the mechanical movement and the speed of the city, being at the same time aware of its dark sides – isolation, overflow of images and exclusion. Today more than ever film is the art that loves the city most. Frankfurt‘s international film festival LICHTER, taking place from March 19 to 24, dedicates this year‘s program to the city. A journey in 15 films from Tokyo to New York, from Naples to Recife. The city appears as a space enabling encounters, interactions, stories – and at the same time as a somewhat endangered habitat, that the filmmakers venture to protect. The film program will be accompanied by a series of lectures and debates with a the AGORA, a six-hour-long debate marathon hosted by renowned architect Arno Brandlhuber. The retrospective is dedicated to American director James Gray portraying his native New York City. Follow these recommendations or visit the screening schedule for the whole section.

Sophia and Malcolm are the next big stars in Graffiti art – sadly nobody knows this yet. To change this, and to earn some respect in the scene, they decide to put their “tag” on one of New York’s trademarks, the New York Mets apple that appears after every home run hit at Shea Stadium. Standing between them and their fame is just 500 dollars, needed to bribe the night guard at the baseball stadium. An exciting journey begins, with lots of mistakes and de-viations. Adam Leon’s début film reveals his years spent learning from Woody Allen. Gimme the loot is one of the most light-hearted films about youth culture for a long time, simultane-ously a comedy and background social analysis. New York is shown simultaneously as a place of almost unlimited possibilities and a place of high social barriers.

Little seems unusual in an unprepossessing, middle-class street in Recife in Brazil, apart from the now normal bars on windows and surveillance cameras. There is obviously no rational reason why a private security service should want to send its officers here. But while we fol-low the company’s resourceful boss as he convinces the residents of his offer, we learn the complicated and contradictory stories that make up this area of the city. They reach from the country’s violent past to the everyday problems of its middle class, and encompass these arcs in a strange, exciting, breathless film photographed in beautiful Cinemascope. Show: Thursday, 21. March 2013, 20:30 p.m., Filmmuseum

Victor and Rainer are taking a train to Paris for an evening out. They want to celebrate and enjoy their lives and the excesses of the city. What they find is artificial nightclub beauty, drugs, aggression, violence and their own emotional frailty. They go from one disappointment to the next. We accompany them as they walk along the Seine – following their mostly sober-ing discoveries about the city and themselves. Their path leads them from Paris into a forest, where the calm and the moon put their friendship in a different light. L’âge atomique observes youth and relationships in the resonating cavity of the city. Héléna Klotz films her figures lov-ingly, secretly and honestly. We follow her on the search for their identity and their views of the world.

The ambitious Governor Madamji wants to turn the sleepy, provincial town of Bharat Nagar into the Indian Shanghai, a shiny city of offices and luxury apartments. That people get left behind is not a problem. When Dr. Ahmedi, a well-known critic of the project, is killed in a hit-and-run incident after an appearance in the town, the investigative ambition of the camer-aman Joginder stirs. On an accidentally recorded tape, he discovers evidence of the corrupt machinations behind the project. A racing, action thriller is the result, which is based on plot of the famous novel “Z” – filmed in 1969 by Costa-Gavras. With the bling of Bollywood and an associated amount of political commitment, Shanghai highlights the dark sides of Indian politics. Show: Tuesday, 19. March 2013, 22:30 p.m., Metropolis 11

LICHTER takes place from March 19th to 24th, 2013 at several cinemas in Frankfurt/Germany.

In 2013, a new festival section will rise up as part of the LICHTER – Filmfest Frankfurt International: Lichter Streetview! LICHTER uses a variety of media to recapture the seemingly lost urban space with the help of cinema and projection. As one of the first film festivals in the German-speaking region, new forms of cinema and methods of projection are discovered, in order to move urban locations back into focus and render them tangible again.

An adventure playground for all

The LICHTER Film Festival would like to contrast the, for consumption adapted, city center with the LICHTER Streetview and to dislocate the perception of the city. Everyone is invited to participate and through this reclaim the space of their city. How can the moving image in the urban context provide meaning? The competition is open to film makers, architects, cinema makers, artists, street and urban art activists who realise their ideas in Frankfurt in the context of the LICHTER Film Festival, thereby creating an event that is encouraging a sense of community. Whether experimental formats or classical narration – the film develops itself.

The new section will be accompanied by a blog called LICHTER Streetview. Please recommend us – to your friends and acquaintances, to other artists and »interventionists«! The blog has just started and we have publishing just a few examples, but I promise: this is changing and is likely to change more rapidly than you expect. If you want to participate with your work or vision at LICHTER Streetview, please contact us.

LICHTER Streetview will be first presented as a part of LICHTER Filmfest Frankfurt and takes place at Roßmarkt from 3/22 to 3/23/2013.